Sustaining multilateral trade cooperation in a multipolar world economy

The deadlock in the WTO Doha Round has been accompanied by an increased focus on the negotiation of preferential trade agreements, including so-called ‘mega-regionals’. This paper discusses possible implications for—and possible responses by—excluded countries that have little prospects of participating in most of the mega-regionals. A number of complementary avenues are identified through which such countries might attenuate the potential downsides of preferential trade liberalization among large countries, as well as some proposals that would expand the scope to pursue cooperation on regulatory policies in the WTO as opposed to PTAs.     

Das Individuum und die Vermischung der Genres

By considering cultural practices and preferences in terms of intra-individual behavioral variation it is possible to construct a model of the social world which does not neglect individual singularities and avoids the cultural caricature of social groups. Thus, it becomes clear that the boundary between ??cultural legitimacy?? and ??cultural illegitimacy?? does not only separate different social classes, but divides up the cultural practices and preferences of individuals themselves across all classes. Without challenging the existence of social inequalities in terms of the most legitimate forms of culture, such a scientific point of view allows to establish the marked statistical frequency of individual cultural profiles composed of heterogeneous or dissonant elements. The article considers the socio-historical conditions that produce heterogeneous cultural profiles and shows that these frequent cultural dissonances allow to reinterpret the social functions of culture and to highlight the importance of the study of intra-individual behavioral variations within the framework of a sociology of dispositional and contextual plurality.